Editor’s note
From the Karakum
At the end of the nineteenth century, a herdsman remembered in local accounts only as Gara Molla noticed that the mud along a shrunken salt lake west of modern Balkanabat, a remnant of the Old Uzboy channel sitting some thirteen meters below sea level, seemed to ease the aches of anyone who lingered in it. Within a generation the place had a name, Mollagara, and the standing of a health resort, its peloid mud and brine baths drawing people who came simply to rest and recover (Turkmenistan: Golden Age). Turkmen leisure has older roots in this ground than the glass towers of Avaza suggest.
I raise it because I'm easing into a summer of my own. Until the end of August, I'm taking things slower, with most of my hours going to a book, several journal manuscripts, and a run of shorter pieces: work heading toward my usual outlets, plus a few new ones along the way. For now, my LinkedIn will run mostly on refreshed reposts while the deeper work happens quietly behind the scenes, but I'll keep the monthly Karakum Brief going with new editions, of course. I'm also exploring how to put my specialization to use in a more professional capacity, so I'd welcome the conversation with anyone who has advice or leads to offer. I'm particularly interested in how I can draw on my three career tracks: international development, research/analysis, and education, so I'm open to pretty much anything, from lecturer to analyst to, possibly, even a fellowship. Check out my website, christopherwizda.com, for more about me, or scroll my LinkedIn page. I'm also considering applying for a PhD next year, so any advice on that would be great.
Anyways, the personal hook this month: my abstract, "Turkmenistan's Solar Energy Heritage and Pathways to Climate-Resilient Renewable Development," was accepted into Magtymguly Turkmen State University's June conference on environment and climate, under the Ministry of Education, a huge privilege for me; more on that in the Deep Dive. This issue, fittingly for the season, reads rest and recovery against the country's harder business: a wire to Kabul, a Caspian deal with Kuala Lumpur, and a sun the territory has only begun to bank.
The Lead
Turkmen Leisure as Economic Strategy
Context. Turkmenistan still sells roughly ninety percent of its gas to a single buyer through the Central Asia to China pipeline system, and the whole of its declared strategy is to widen the revenue base around that anchor. Most of the attention goes to the hard bets: pipelines, power lines, offshore blocks, stranded-power-to-compute. One softer bet gets overlooked, partly because the state markets it so loudly that analysts tune it out. That bet is leisure. Turkmenistan is trying to turn rest, recovery, and domestic tourism into an economic line item, and unlike its gas customers, this lineage is genuinely home-grown, running from a nineteenth-century herdsman's mud lake through the Soviet sanatorium system to the Avaza coast.
Observation. The lineage is concrete. Mollagara, the salt-lake resort in the Editor's Note above, was rebuilt into a six-story balneological complex reopened in 2012, and the state now runs it as peloidotherapy and "rapa"-bath treatment, per the Health Ministry (saglykhm.gov.tm) and Turkmenistan: Golden Age. The modern showpiece is Avaza, the national tourist zone on the Caspian near Türkmenbaşy, officially presented in June 2007 and inaugurated in June 2009. Turkmen official accounts put the cost of constructed facilities above 1.5 billion dollars; Anadolu Agency counts roughly 150,000 visitors a year. A June 2026 state piece markets the summer season directly, naming the beachfront hotels (Gämi, Hazar, Deniz, Berkarar) and a new daily Ashgabat to Avaza bus line, and the 2018 Avaza sanatorium adds thalassotherapy drawn from a 600-meter well. Ashgabat frames all of it, explicitly, as economic diversification.
Analysis. Read as diversification, leisure has one clear advantage over the gas-adjacent bets: it is culturally authentic. Rest and recovery are not imported concepts here; they run through folk medicine, the sanatorium tradition, and the seasonal rhythm of a desert people. The state is building on something real rather than bolting on a turnkey sector. But the model is domestic-facing and structurally capped. While Turkmenistan's visa framework has traditionally limited international arrivals, ongoing steps to streamline it point toward broader tourism potential down the line. In the meantime, the "world-class resort" experience is one enjoyed largely by Turkmen visitors themselves. The site itself faces a natural challenge: AsiaNews and RFE/RL report that the receding Caspian has pulled the shoreline well back from Avaza's hotels, leaving water that is now shallow and distant. Turkmenistan has not disclosed the total cost of the development, though individual luxury hotels are reported to have cost $40 to $50 million each.
So What. My strong claim is this: leisure is one of the more culturally authentic of Turkmenistan's diversification bets, and also one of the least likely to earn foreign currency at scale. Domestic tourism recirculates money that is already inside the economy. It does not draw in hard currency the way a gas contract or a transit fee does. But that limit is not the whole story. Even without full visa liberalization or more openly published data, Avaza already works well as a showpiece and a conference venue, and its greater potential may lie in a direction that plays directly to the country's strengths.
A state that relies heavily on a single gas buyer benefits from demand it can shape at home, and health tourism is a natural regional niche should the borders open further. That niche is also no import. Turkmens have taken the waters for generations. The mud cures at Mollagara, on the bed of the ancient Uzboy, trace to a nineteenth-century herdsman's discovery; the mineral springs at Archman carry their own folklore; and the Soviet era added sanatoria along the Caspian coast. Rest is among the oldest forms of leisure the country already knows how to offer its own people.
That heritage is part of what makes the sector so promising. Avaza's beaches face a natural constraint, since the Caspian is gradually withdrawing from the shoreline, but the inland balneological resorts need no coast at all. Their growth depends mainly on visa policy and on how openly the country presents itself, both of which Ashgabat has recently begun to ease. As a complement to gas revenue, wellness may be the most quietly durable of the paths Turkmenistan is now exploring, and the one whose ceiling is set more by policy, which can change, than by geology, which cannot.
What This Doesn't Tell Us Yet. The figures are almost all state or single-source: the 1.5 billion dollar construction cost is an official number, the 150,000 annual visitors is Anadolu's, and independent revenue or occupancy data does not exist in the open. We cannot say whether the receding Caspian forces a strategic pivot inland toward the mud-and-mineral sanatoria that started this story, or whether any visa loosening is genuinely on the table for the long term. Whether Turkmen leisure becomes diversification or stays domestic recirculation is the open question, and it will be answered by border policy, not by beach frontage. I’m personally hopeful and hope to travel again to Turkmenistan as a leisure tourist to soak in the rays and wade in the mud!
The Blotter
Turkmenistan Blotter
Meredov hosts a ten-company US business delegation.
Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov met US-Turkmenistan Business Council (USTBC) director Eric Stewart and a group of American firms, John Deere and Westport Trading among them, with a Chamber of Commerce roundtable on transport and logistics, energy, oil and gas, and agriculture. Modest in substance, but Washington-facing engagement is itself the signal for a neutrality state.
Paul Nadar's 1890 Turkmen photographs go on show in Ashgabat.
The Museum of Fine Arts hosted "A Journey to Turkmen Lands," 45 black-and-white images the French photographer Paul Nadar made along the new Transcaspian Railway in 1890, organized with the French Institute and the Embassy of France. A rare early visual record of the territory, and the month's clearest culture note.
PETRONAS signs a binding Caspian offshore deal on its thirtieth year in country.
During Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's visit to Ashgabat, PETRONAS Carigali (Turkmenistan) Sdn Bhd took a 100 percent interest in a production sharing agreement for Offshore Block-19 and Block-20, paired with a northern-blocks seismic accord and a government-to-government framework touching possible Galkynysh work. This is entry into new exploration acreage, not just a renewal of a thirty-year presence.
The IMF closes its Article IV mission with a growth caution.
The International Monetary Fund estimated 2025 growth at 3.6 percent and projected a slowdown to roughly 2.4 percent in 2026, well below the official line, while pressing for exchange-rate unification and an end to central-bank directed lending. Inflation has eased to 2.7 percent. The gap between this number and the EBRD's is itself worth watching (see Resources Desk).
Ashgabat games out its own water future to 2050.
A UN-backed high-level dialogue, opened by Resident Coordinator Dmitry Shlapachenko, walked three water scenarios for Turkmenistan through 2050 and floated a regional center for climate-change technologies. The framing is notable for a state that rarely models its own scarcity out loud, and it pairs directly with the Qosh Tepa pressure in this month's Watch.
The Turkmenistan to Afghanistan 500 kV line clears ninety percent on its second phase.
Afghanistan's power utility DABS reported the Sheberghan to Dasht-e Alwan segment about 90.8 percent complete, with 202 of 305 kilometers strung and 747 of 775 towers up; Phase 1 is done and Phase 3 runs on to the Arghandi substation near Kabul. It is the quieter half of the southward TAP corridor, and unlike TAPI it is being energized in countable increments.
Belarus presses to widen its Turkmen trade footprint.
Following a Belarusian business mission to Ashgabat, the two sides advanced agreements spanning foodstuffs, machinery, and banking software, with Minsk reported to be eyeing pulp and wood-product sales as well. Small in isolation, it is a deliberate widening of Turkmenistan's non-Russian, non-Chinese commercial ties.
The Watch
Caspian & Central Asia Watch
The EBRD calls Central Asia its fastest-growing region, and counts Turkmenistan in.
The Bank's June outlook projects the six economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan growing 5.6 percent in 2026, the highest of any EBRD region, cooling from 6.9 percent in 2025. It puts Turkmenistan at 6.3 percent for both 2026 and 2027, citing Q1 oil-and-gas overperformance and the Galkynysh Phase 4 launch. Notable mainly because, unlike most regional outlooks, it bothers to include Turkmenistan at all.
Desertification gets its own caravan, heading for Ulaanbaatar.
UNCCD COP17 convenes in Mongolia from August 17 to 28, themed "Restoring Land, Restoring Hope," and the Silk Road Caravan, a 6,000-kilometer overland journey from last year's Riyadh COP to this year's host city, is carrying the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026 along with it. With roughly eighty-six percent of Turkmenistan classed as desert or semi-desert, rangeland degradation and pastoral livelihoods are not abstractions here; they are the Karakum's own file.
Qosh Tepa keeps digging, and the downstream math is brutal for Ashgabat.
Carnegie reports nearly half of Afghanistan's planned 285-kilometer canal complete, on track to draw as much as ten cubic kilometers a year from the Amu Darya, about a third of its flow, by 2028. Drawing on Daryo, the Jamestown Foundation warns Turkmenistan could face up to an eighty percent cut to its water share. Turkmenistan takes roughly ninety percent of its water from the Amu Darya through the Karakum Canal, which is what makes the June water dialogue above less a seminar than a rehearsal.
The Middle Corridor's bottleneck is the Caspian itself.
A Carnegie assessment puts the corridor at roughly six percent of the Northern Corridor's throughput, with the falling sea now part of the problem: Azerbaijan's Caspian shipping company reports rail-tank-car ferry traffic down twenty-two percent and wagon traffic down ten percent. For Türkmenbaşy, whose transshipment case rests on a working ferry link, a shrinking sea is a slow tax on the whole pitch.
New satellite data says the Caspian is falling faster than the models assumed.
Per the Astana Times, citing the Central Asian Climate Fund, NASA data for 2020 to 2025 show the sea dropping nearly seven centimeters a year, around twenty times the rate of global ocean rise, with the shallow northern basin potentially gone by 2050. Kazakhstan's ecology ministry logs a fall of more than two meters since 2006; RFE/RL's Turkmen service has noted a thirty-five to forty-centimeter retreat on the Turkmen coast. This is the slow story beneath every corridor and resort headline, Avaza included.
Deep Dive
Monthly Deep Dive
Turkmenistan's Solar Energy Heritage: A Conference Abstract, and a Manuscript in the Making
In place of the usual LinkedIn long-form this month, the deep work went into an academic abstract. "Turkmenistan's Solar Energy Heritage and Pathways to Climate-Resilient Renewable Development" was accepted into the environment-and-climate conference hosted in June by Turkmen State University named after Magtymguly under the Ministry of Education of Turkmenistan. A fuller manuscript is now in preparation for publication, and this is the short version of its argument.
The case begins with the obvious: Turkmenistan sits in one of the most solar-rich environments on Earth, roughly eighty-six percent desert or semi-desert, with somewhere between 2,768 and 3,081 sunshine hours a year, about 300 sunny days, and incident irradiance of 600 to 800 watts per square meter. The less obvious part is that the country has a documented scientific lineage in solar work, not just sunlight. Soviet-era programs in Ashgabat ran sustained research on solar heating and photovoltaics for desert pastures; in 1986 a 10 kW plant with parabolic-trough concentrators was built at the Bikrova settlement near the capital, associated with the NPO Kvant affiliate and the physicist B. A. Bazarov. A 498-page monograph by Strebkov, Penjiyev, and Mamedsakhatov in 2012 consolidated the technical and economic basis for going further.
The recovery since the mid-2010s is structured, not incidental. A 2014 presidential decree established an Institute of Solar Energy under the Academy of Sciences; a 2009 to 2012 EU TEMPUS project tied Turkmen institutions to Spanish, German, and Portuguese partners; the 2021 Law on Renewable Energy Sources gave deployment a legal spine. Investment followed: a November 2022 Turkmenenergo and Masdar agreement for the country's first utility-scale solar plant, a Çalik Enerji hybrid wind-and-solar facility near the Altyn Asyr lake, and a UNDP and Global Environment Facility project putting photovoltaic water systems into remote Karakum villages such as Bori, Yel, Bashkak, and Kelleli.
The argument the manuscript will press is that all of this rests on a foundation older than most regional coverage assumes, and that building on it, rather than importing a turnkey solar sector from scratch, is the credible path. The country that flares gas at Darvaza also has a half-century of quiet solar science behind it. The sun is the resource it has not yet learned to bank.
From the LinkedIn Feed
The Three Threads
The month closed out the fifteen-part Colors of Turkmenistan series, so the distribution runs thematic-heavy by design, with the analytical and satellite tracks each represented by their strongest entry.
Signal Track (AI and methodology, typically Mondays)
Overhead Track (GIS and satellite, typically Wednesdays)
Karakum Track (thematic, typically Fridays)
From the Desk
From the Desk
Published recently
Comparative Civilizations Forum℠, May 31, 2026
Melodies of the Karakum: What Turkmen Music Reveals About Civilizational Endurance.
How an oral civilization survives being institutionally rebuilt from the outside, read through Turkmen music.
The Praevisio Institute For Geopolitical Affairs
Buy From Everyone, Owe No One: The Military Logic of Turkmen Neutrality and the American Opening After Iran.
On why Turkmenistan's eclectic arsenal is a deliberate expression of neutrality, and how the procurement environment around Ashgabat has just shifted.
From the Archive. From Moscow to Ulaanbaatar: How Deep Regional Engagement Built Actionable Expertise. The piece is a first-person retrospective: it opens with my first trip to Russia in 2010, a New Year's visit to a friend, and traces the years of lived engagement across the former Soviet space that followed, out to my current base in Ulaanbaatar. The argument is that regional expertise worth acting on is built by showing up and staying, not by reading from a distance, and that the same habits of sustained, on-the-ground attention are what this newsletter runs on. Worth resurfacing now for two reasons: it is the throughline of the summer's manuscript work, and its endpoint, Ulaanbaatar, is the city about to host UNCCD COP17 in August, the same desertification file that runs through this month's Watch. Original LinkedIn post.
Also reading
- Turkmenistan: reporters' rare journey (Reuters podcast, June 6). A first-hand account of a journalist’s visit to the country. Link.
- Kara-Bogaz-Gol, Turkmenistan (Saltwork Consultants). A technical companion to the Garabogazköl color post, on the lagoon's brine chemistry and mineral economy. Link.
Source Spotlight
Source Spotlight
The Mirasym Turkmen Heritage Archive. Mirasym is a Turkmen cultural-heritage project running across two linked platforms: an openly shared Google Drive library of digitized books and a companion YouTube channel, @mirasymyz, whose About page points back to the same folder. Its organizing purpose is re-scripting, taking twentieth-century Turkmen texts printed in Cyrillic and rendering them into modern Latin orthography, and in at least one case into the Perso-Arabic script that Iranian Turkmen communities in the Turkmen Sahra of Golestan still use (a modified Arabic alphabet adapted through Persian, not the bare Arabic or Persian alphabet). The Drive holds six titles across poetry, biography, folklore, a practical guide to building the dutar, and a Turkmen rendering of Graham Greene.
Why it deserves attention, and how I use it. The value runs two ways: the texts themselves, several hard to find in Latin script, and the project as an object of study in how Turkmen heritage is preserved, re-scripted, and re-circulated across three alphabets and the line between homeland and diaspora. I treat it as a primary-text reservoir and as a case study in cultural transmission.
One honest caveat. This is a working reservoir, not a curated database, and it is built for readers of Turkmen. There is no catalog, no search, no metadata layer, and the files sit across three alphabets; anyone who does not read Turkmen fluently, in Latin, Cyrillic, and the Perso-Arabic hand alike, will find the collection hard to navigate and harder to use with confidence. Treat it as a primary-text trove for the language-equipped rather than a finished reference, and expect to do your own sorting. Drive library; YouTube.
Methodology Bench
Methodology Bench
Sampling a desert's true palette: three Sentinel-2 dates over Repetek
This month's color work was an exercise in reading a satellite honestly. The question was simple: what color is the Karakum, really, and the method was to stop trusting index colormaps and sample the true-color signal directly.
The site is not arbitrary. The Repetek Biosphere Reserve sits in the eastern Karakum in Lebap Province, roughly seventy kilometers south of Türkmenabat. It grew out of a sand-desert research station the Imperial Russian Geographical Society founded in 1912, became a reserve in October 1927, the first desert reserve in the Soviet Union, and was recognized by UNESCO under the Man and the Biosphere programme in 1979. Its black saxaul (Haloxylon aphyllum) forest covers about 1,470 hectares, some 4.5 percent of the territory, and it is one of the hottest places in Central Asia, with sand-surface temperatures that can approach 80 degrees Celsius. A near-century of published desert science makes it about as ground-truthed a patch of Karakum as exists.
The instrument is the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2, a two-satellite constellation carrying a 13-band multispectral imager at 10, 20, and 60-meter resolution with a revisit of about five days. The true-color read uses the three 10-meter visible bands: B4 red, B3 green, B2 blue. The scaffolding:
- Pull multiple dates, not one. I took three Sentinel-2 captures over Repetek across the season. A single date tells you the weather that day; the series tells you the cycle.
- Sample the true-color pixels directly. The greens and oranges of an NDVI or SWIR layer are assigned by the colormap, not reflected by the ground. Sampling the B4, B3, and B2 values gives a real palette, and that palette is a near-monochrome tan, with even the saxaul stands reading only slightly darker.
- Let the indices find what true color hides. Four indices, NDVI, a moisture index, a water index, and a SWIR composite, all place the same lower-left feature in the same interdune depression, peaking on the same March date within about fifteen pixels. That agreement is the evidence; one index alone could be noise.
- Read the number, not the picture. NDVI vegetated area climbs from 0.06 percent in January to 5.29 percent on March 30, then falls to 0.68 percent by June. That is the living pixel: saxaul and spring ephemerals leafing out after the winter rains, roots driving fourteen to sixteen meters down to a hidden water table the green pulse maps from above.
What the discipline buys you is a defensible palette and a located water source, both pulled from a scene that looks, to the naked eye, like one flat tone, over ground whose century of desert-station records lets you check the satellite against something real. Method post.
Resources
Resources Desk
Country reports and briefings
- IMF, 2026 Article IV Mission Concluding Statement, Turkmenistan (June 22, 2026). The cleanest external read on the macro picture, with the headline 2026 growth projection of roughly 2.4 percent and the structural agenda (exchange-rate unification, winding down directed lending). Link.
- EBRD, Regional Economic Prospects (June 2026). Valuable as the optimistic counterweight: it includes Turkmenistan at 6.3 percent for 2026, against the IMF's 2.4 percent. Reading the two side by side is the exercise. Link.
Datasets and tools
- Rayon mapping. A browser-based mapping tool useful for quick spatial sketches and shareable map layers. maps.rayon.design.
- Ene Dilim Kitaphana. A Turkmen-language digital book library, a working source for primary texts and reference material in Turkmen. enedilim.com/kitaphana.
- TM History on VK. A VK page collecting Turkmen historical material. A disclaimer is in order: VK is a Russian social-media platform, and a portion of the material is pirated, which limits how its materials should be cited. That said, it surfaces old, often public-domain archival items that are genuinely hard to find elsewhere, so it has real value as a discovery tool when used with care. vk.com/tmhistory.
- Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan, 1834 to 1949 (Adam Matthew Digital). A deep digitized run of UK Foreign Office files, namely correspondence, intelligence reports, agents' diaries, minutes, maps, and newspaper excerpts drawn from the FO 65, FO 106, FO 371, and FO 539 series, covering the region from the decline of the Silk Road through the arrival of Soviet rule in the early 1920s to Allied and Axis intrigue in neutral Afghanistan during the Second World War. It spans almost the whole of the Great Game, from the Black Sea to the Pamirs, and a new-for-2026 second module extends the Afghanistan files from 1923 to 1949, the 1928 to 1929 civil war through the war years. Access is institutional and subscription-based, so treat it as a library-through resource. Link.
Archival curiosity
- Туркменоведение (1927). An early Soviet-era Turkmen-studies serial, of interest as a window into how the territory was being documented and framed in the first years after the republics were drawn. I am still on the hunt for scanned editions of the serial, so if anyone reading has links to digitized runs, please send them my way.
Announcements
Announcements & Events
Upcoming.
- Exhibition of Economic Achievements of Turkmenistan. September 17 to 19, Ashgabat. Tied to the 35th anniversary of independence, a read on how the state frames its own economic story. 2026 forum calendar.
- Turkmenistan Investment Forum (TIF). October 1 to 30, Ashgabat. The event most directly aimed at foreign investors. 2026 forum calendar.
- CIS Heads of State Summit. October 9, Avaza, Türkmenbaşy. Turkmenistan holds the 2026 CIS chairmanship; Putin is expected, with a cluster of side meetings (Central Asian consultative summit October 8, a Caspian environment ministerial October 7). The highest-profile diplomatic set-piece of the Turkmen year. Turkmenistan Government; TASS.
- Oil and Gas of Turkmenistan (OGT 2026). October 21 to 23, Ashgabat. The 31st edition, themed "Energy. Partnership. Progress," with Galkynysh Phase 4, TAPI, and offshore Caspian on the agenda. The key energy-calendar event. Turkmenistan Government.
- 15th International Trade Fair for Construction, Building, Energy and Electric Industries. November 3 to 5, Ashgabat, Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This firms up the previously unfixed November date flagged last edition, the venue where downstream and infrastructure deal-signaling tends to surface. Turkmen Construction Industry; 2026 forum calendar.
- International Transport and Transit Corridors, with Turkmentel 2026. November 24 to 26, Ashgabat, Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The connectivity-and-telecom double-bill that closes the business year; the two forums now run on one platform. ITTC official site; Turkmentelecom.
Worth noting.
- CT Week side event, June 29. Just past, but worth recording: Turkmenistan co-organized a UN Counter-Terrorism Week side event with the Permanent Mission of Finland, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, UN CTED, and UNOCT, presenting national counter-terrorism case material. A quiet instance of Ashgabat working inside a multilateral security room it usually sits out. UN CTED.
What to Watch
What to Watch
The Afghan electricity line through the summer.
Watch whether Phase 3 toward Kabul holds the welding pace, whether payment stays current, and whether the TAP framing ever carries volume on to Pakistan. A quiet summer of no kilometer counts would say the spring burst was signaling.
Whether the PETRONAS deal moves from signature to drill.
The Block-19 and Block-20 production sharing agreement is binding, but the test is whether seismic on the northern blocks and the government-to-government framework produce an actual Galkynysh work program or a well spudded offshore.
What Turkmenistan brings to UNCCD COP17.
The desertification COP runs in Ulaanbaatar August 17 to 28 under "Restoring Land, Restoring Hope," in the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. For a country that is overwhelmingly desert and losing Amu Darya water, watch whether Ashgabat shows up with a concrete rangeland or land-restoration commitment, or treats it as another photo line. This is the file the Archive piece above walks toward.
Solar deployment signals.
Construction milestones on the Masdar 100 MW plant and the Çalik hybrid facility would turn the heritage argument in this month's Deep Dive into measurable capacity.
The IMF Article IV full report.
The concluding statement is out; the full report to the Executive Board, with the detailed numbers behind the 2.4 percent call, is the document to read against the EBRD's 6.3 percent.
The 2026 irrigation season and the Amu Darya number.
June produced a water dialogue and scenarios; the growing season produces facts. Watch whether any of the declaratory momentum turns into an actual allocation figure as Qosh Tepa advances, or whether Ashgabat's own three-scenario modeling quietly stays on the shelf. The tell is a number on a page, not another forum.
Magtymguly
Magtymguly of the Month
From "Duz hem bolmasa" (If There Is Not Even Salt):
Aýak bar ýörmäge, el bar almaga,
Kany bende, saglyk şükrün kylmaga,
Gulak bardyr eşitgenin bilmäge,
Kim düzeder tilde söz hem bolmasa.
(There are feet for walking, hands for taking;
but where is the one who gives thanks for his health?
There are ears to take in what is heard,
yet who could set things right, were there no words on the tongue?)
Why this one, this month. Magtymguly runs down the ordinary gifts of a working body, feet to walk, hands to take, ears to hear, and stops on the one nobody counts: who gives thanks for their health? It is a strikingly modern question for an edition about a country trying to build an economy on rest and recovery, from the mud baths at Mollagara to the Avaza coast. The poet prized health as the blessing people notice only once it is gone.
Connect
Let’s talk
If you work in Central Asian policy, Caspian energy, Eurasian trade corridors, cultural and historical research, or regional analysis, or if something in this edition sparked an interest of your own, I would welcome the conversation.
And on a side note, I'm open to consulting, research, and speaking engagements, as well as the right full-time opportunity, and I'm especially keen to explore fellowships, part-time lecturing, and research roles.
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